Sir Henry Wotton’s The Elements of Architecture This short book, a compilation of architectural theory, was a gift to Christopher Wren Sr. (1589-1658), Dean of Windsor and father of the noted architect, from the author, the diplomat Sir Henry Wotton (1568-1639). While its title suggests a rather grand project, the scope of the work is […]
With the eyes of the world eagerly trained on Tokyo and the successes and setbacks of the globe’s most accomplished athletes, it seems an appropriate moment to celebrate one of Peterhouse’s very own true sporting greats – and an Olympian to boot. It is almost exactly one hundred years to the day that Syed Mohammad […]
In summer 2018, we installed three bronzes in the Ward Library by the American-Italian sculptor Raimondo Puccinelli (1904-1986; for further details, see his autobiography: https://www.deutsches-tanzarchiv.de/archiv/nachlaesse-sammlungen/p/raymond-raimondo-puccinelli/fragmentarischer-autobiographischer-text). The bronzes were donated by Hans-Jörg Modlmayr (Pet. m.1964) and Hildegard Modlmayr-Heimath, who had earlier donated three larger bronzes by Puccinelli which now stand in the Scholars’ Garden. The bronzes […]
At the end of January, the United Kingdom left the European Union. To mark this event, the Ward Library has been supplementing its collection of the writings of Mark Fitzgeorge-Parker (1954-2014), a Petrean who reinvented himself as the racing novelist ‘Mark Daniel’. ‘A sensualist… and compulsive writer, cook, scholar and lover’, Mark wrote ’37 published […]
On 30 May 1758 a twelve-year-old girl sat down with her grandmother to embark on an Educational Exercise: composing an ‘extract’ of the English portion of Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland, probably the second edition of 1587 a copy of which survives in the library where they were staying, which was Windsor Castle. […]
We likely know more about Thomas Deynman, M.D. (d. 1500-01) than we do about other physicians active during the reign of Henry VII. He was admitted to Peterhouse as a Fellow in 1473, and was Doctor of Medicine by 1485-86. He was nominated by the Fellows to be Master of Peterhouse in November 1500 but […]
This post presents an addendum to Rodney Thomson’s Descriptive Catalogue of the Medieval Manuscripts in the Library of Peterhouse (2016), and records a previously unnoticed manuscript that is bound with one of the College’s printed books. For a fuller history of that volume, given to Peterhouse by John Cosin, see July’s blog post (‘Gold Leaf […]
The fifteenth-century catalogue of the Peterhouse Library, initially compiled on Christmas Eve 1418, gives details of over 450 manuscripts. Our present collection of some 270 manuscript volumes represents over half the working library which was accumulated by the College during the two and a half centuries after its foundation; and is one of only three […]
Among the books that John Cosin (1595-1672) gave to Peterhouse, Cambridge, in 1662 is a volume of a large folio Bible in Latin (Perne Library, shelfmark S. 10b). It is printed in two colours (black and red) on vellum, with extensive penwork in red, blue, green, and purple inks (providing chapter headings, numbers, some initial […]
